by
Sara Kermanian
BArch, University of Tehran, 2010 MASA, The University of British Columbia, 2014
A Thesis Submitted in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of
MASTER OF ARTS
in the Department of Political Science
© Sara Kermanian, 2017 University of Victoria
All rights reserved. This thesis may not be reproduced in whole or in part, by photocopy or other means, without the permission of the author.
Supervisory Committee
Scale and Exile:
The Portrait of the Kurdish Question in the Theory of Democratic Confederalism by
Sara Kermanian
BArch, University of Tehran, 2010
MASA, The University of British Columbia, 2014
Supervisory Committee
Dr. Robert B.J. Walker, (Department of Political Science) Supervisor
Dr. Scott Watson, (Department of Political Science) Departmental Member
Abstract
Supervisory Committee
Dr. Robert B.J. Walker, (Department of Political Science)
Supervisor
Dr. Scott Watson, (Department of Political Science)
Departmental Member
This research examines the relation of scalar arrangements of the statist political orders and the formation of the condition of exile, exemplified in the case of the Kurdish statelessness through a critical reading of Abdullah Öcalan's theory of democratic confederalism. This reading, I will argue, permits understanding the scalar implications of what I call the tyranny of the present of the state. The tyranny of the present refers to the tendency of statist formations to expand the domination of their metaphysical presence through attempting to turn their present into the future of those who are considered less developed and aiming to prevent the perception of any unpredictable future that might interrupt their presence. This temporal hegemony is imposed through a centralized and hierarchical scalar order that determines quantitative multiplication of the diversity of human societies and the order of authority of the structure that brings them together as a whole. Together the scalar-temporal arrangement of the structure implies the ways through which the presence of the state determines the condition of the
impossibility of the presence of the stateless and the exclusion of the stateless determines the condition of the possibility of the presence of the state. I will argue that this is the desire to leave the aporetic condition of the state/statelessness binary that leads Öcalan to aim for the destruction of the state and the construction of a communalist structure that permits the non-exclusive existence of time’s pure being in itself. However, his solution, similar to the communalist approaches by whom he is influenced, is limited by his ignorance of the paradoxicality of the creation of communalism externally and the destruction of the state internally and by his underestimation of the state-generating forces of the of rules of securitization in the international system that is not based on communal values.
Table of Contents
Supervisory Committee ... ii
Abstract ... iii
Table of Contents ... iv
Acknowledgments ... v
Dedication ... vii
Introduction ... 1
Chapter 1: The Kurdish Question: The Time of the State and a History Betrayed ... 10
Chapter 2: Scale of Order in the Theory of Democratic Confederalism ... 71
Chapter 3: The Community and its World: The Trembling of Democratic Confederalism ... 115
Conclusion ... 162
Acknowledgments
I would like to express my gratitude to the WSÁNEĆ and Lekwungen people and other local peoples in whose traditional lands I have lived and have found a place to broaden my understanding of colonialism as a process of erasing others' histories; an understanding that has inspired this writing.
There is always more that could have been done about a writing, more towards that ideal point that we simply call completion or perfection and yet barely have any image of it. Ironically, the very possibility of moving forward stems from the
impossibility of completion; every new question owes its existence to the impossibility of a complete answer. This, for me, is all that is into life: the chance of asking what
questions are worth asking, knowing that we would not be able to answer them completely.
I owe the incompletion of this writing, the way it has let me to dance with my vague thoughts and to find myself in the articulation of questions that while make me regret that I could have done more raise the hope that there is still meaning to my life, to Dr. Rob Walker, for not only did he help me to rethink my way of thinking, he also gave me the very chance of thinking, and thus living, by giving me, a wandering refugee outside the disciplinary borders of academia, a new beginning inside the
unterritorializable land of a discipline that I now call my home.
My warmest gratitude to Dr. Scott Watson for supporting this thesis, for his inspiring and advising me on crucial moments, and for his generous helps with the administrative process of the completion of this thesis. I am also thankful to Dr. Reuben Rose-Redwood for accepting to be my examiner on a short notice and for his insightful questions.
Naming those who helped me to reach this far, wheter they are in Iran or in Canada, and showing my gratitude to all of them through words is impossible. But I want to particularly say thank you to Saeid, for always, lovingly and caringly, reminding me of my existence, giving me the hope for resistance, and pointing to the new beginnings that are to come, whenever I felt to be reaching an ending; to Parsa, for his helpful comments
throughout the process of writing this thesis; and to Sara, for our
forever-inspiring conversations, for encouraging me to come to Victoria and for giving homely moments to my years of homeless solitude.
And finally, I am thankful to my parents for their patient moral and financial support throughout my not-so-linear academic journey. I could not have made it without your help.
Dedication
Introduction
This thesis takes as its starting point a curiosity about the relation between the Kurdish Question and the rescaling of the order of authority expressed in Abdullah Öcalan's theory of democratic confederalism. This curiosity is based on an observation that even though Öcalan does not use the term scale, his analysis suggests that the
Kurdish Question is not simply resolvable through granting autonomy or independence to the Kurds; rather, it demands the deconstruction of the state-based scalar arrangement of the international system and its units entirely.
The exploration that followed this curiosity convinced me to claim that even though Öcalan's project initially aims to respond to the specific case of the Kurdish statelessness, its implications address conceptual and fundamental issues regarding the relation between the condition of statelessness and the scalar-temporal arrangement of the statist world order. Consequently, this research aims to explain the implications of
Öcalan's account of the Kurdish Question for understanding could provide a theoretical framework for understanding how the scalar-temporal arrangement of the world order provides the condition of the impossibility of the political presence of stateless
communities, and how the situation of statelessness provides the condition of possibility of the presence of the statist world order. Consequently, I interpret Öcalan's account of the Kurdish Question as the exemplification of the more general concept of statelessness and not as the specific problem of the Kurdish nation alone.
My interpretation of Öcalan's theory is, implicitly and explicitly, informed by a critical reading of Derrida's critique of the metaphysical presence of the state; a reading that at the same time relies on the skeleton of Derrida's argument and criticizes his lack of
consideration of the relation of time and scale. The overlooked relation of time and scale in Derrida's theory, I believe, is a key element for understanding how the metaphysical presence of the state produces the reciprocal relation of the world order and its negative, the state and the condition of statelessness. It also helps evaluating the limits of theories that attempt to respond to the problem of statelessness or more broadly
political exclusion through rescaling of the order of authority, such as regionalist, communalist, and internationalist approaches. This research aims to take some steps towards articulating the relation of time and scale, which I believe could be extracted from Öcalan's theory, and to explain whether and how this relation confirms the argument and/or sets the limits of anti-statist rescaling projects exemplified in the case of Öcalan's own communalist-regionalist solution to the Kurdish dilemma.
To this end and through a critical reading of Öcalan's theory of democratic
confederalism I undertake three inquiries that are conducted in three consecutive chapters about Öcalan's theory of democratic confederalism. First, I try to explain the temporal dimension of the Kurdish statelessness, or as I call it the temporal exile of the Kurds, by exploring Öcalan's understanding of the historical production of the Kurdish Question and his implicit and explicit critique of existing historiographies for explaining the roots of or proposing a solution to the Kurdish Question. Second, I explore the relation of the
temporal exile of the Kurds and the scalar arrangement of the political order and explain why and how Öcalan’s theory implies that the temporal exile of the stateless subjects is only resolvable through an anti-statist and communalist-regionalist project of rescaling of the order of authority. Finally, I prospect the temporal-scalar condition of the hypothetical encounter of Öcalan's communalism with the world order in which it resides in order to
evaluate the limits and possibilities of his project of rescaling for going beyond the statist paradigms, and thus beyond the binary of state/statelessness, that it claims.
Established in 1978, the Öcalan-led Kurdistan Worker's Party (PKK) was founded, and based on a Marxist-Leninist ideology.1 The party, conforming to the ideas of Abdullah Öcalan, originally aspired to the establishment of a socialist state in the united nation-state of Kurdistan. Stating that Kurdistan is a colony, the organization first adopted a strategy similar to those of most African and Asian national liberation
movements, based on the principles of armed conflict, the denial of the domination of a fascistic feudal class and the rejection of other states occupying any part of Kurdistan.2 From the time of the establishment of the PKK until Öcalan's captivity in Kenya in 1999, and in spite of temporary attempts for ceasefire, his emphasis on the necessity of armed struggle was so blunt that he called “the problems related to fascism and Turkey” as examples of issues that are solely solvable through armed conflict.3
Even though he did not reconsider the core of his socialist beliefs or his ideas about the colonization of Kurdistan, after his abduction Öcalan became a critic of national liberation movements.4 He came to develop a more original understanding of socialism, to distance from the nation-statist solutions, and to argue that armed-struggle is only justified as a mechanism of self-defense.5 He fiercely opposed the existing nation-states in
the Middle East and more generally as repressively centralized, hierarchical and unitary
1 Aliza Marcus, Blood and Belief: The PKK and the Kurdish Fight for Independence (NYU Press, 2007) 28. 2 Paul White, The PKK: Coming down from the Mountains (London, UK: Zed Books Ltd., 2015), 29-30. 3 Abdullah Öcalan, Leadership and People (The Center for the Publication and Distribution of Öcalan's
Works, 2008), 130.
4 Öcalan, Prison Writings I, 237.
and therefore violently at odds with the ethnoreligious diversity of the Middle
East.6 Thus, he gradually began articulating his anti-nation-statist, and more generally, anti-statist, as well as his anti-capitalist secular project of democratic confederalism based on the core principles of decentralization, gender equality, social ecology, and bottom-up direct democracy.7 These principles, Öcalan implies, are realizable only through a project of rescaling that would replace the centrality of the state in the world order with the community and thus ideally replaces the sovereign-state based order of the world with a composition of communities or assemblies of communities.
Öcalan's post-captivity solution to the Kurdish Question echoes the spirit of many contemporary theories who have tried to respond to political issues concerning different forms of violence and exclusion through changing the scalar arrangement of the world order and its political units. What is clearly visible in various projects of rescaling is their rearrangement of the spatial reordering of the political structure; yet, as critics of modern spatiotemporality, especially Jacques Derrida, have argued, what makes political
structures exclusive and anti-democratic is their closeness to time and to futurity.8 For Derrida, whose work informs the analysis to be developed here, the coming of that which might interrupt the present order, and which might alter the direction of time from the planned future, is democracy itself. However, this critique has paid little attention to the
6 Öcalan, Democratic Confederalism; Abdullah Öcalan, Democratic Nation (Cologne: International Initiative Edition, 2016); Abdullah Öcalan, War and Peace in Kurdistan: Perspectives for a political solution of the Kurdish question (Cologne: International Initiative Edition, 2012).
7 These are frequently emphasized themes in all of his post-captivity books.
8 Jacques Derrida, Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning, and the New International (New York: Routledge, 2006); Jacques Derrida, Rogues: Two Essays on Reason (California: Stanford University Press, 2005).
politics of rescaling projects, especially to whether and how they treat the concept of time, implicitly and explicitly.
Taking the relation between the Kurdish Question and the rescaling of the order of authority expressed in Öcalan's theory as an exemplary, I argue that the condition of statelessness does not simply refer to the lack of spatial determination of a nation from the world map. Rather, it refers to a condition of temporal exile that is overall resulted by attempts for the domination of the temporality of the statist orders over that of the
community and democracy. This tyrannical presence, I argue, subsequently produces and is produced through the emergence of zones of statelessness. Through a critical
engagement with Öcalan's philosophy of history, I will argue that not only the denial of the history and historical agency of the stateless subjects reflects the limits of modern philosophies of history, the inability of the dominant states for democratic collaborations with the Kurds point to the limits of the statist temporalities to futurity and to the
occurrence of that which might interrupt their presence.
The temporal exile of the stateless people to the statist temporality denies them the possibility of development within the structure; yet, this exile ironically makes them desire a future and thus a form of development that is the present of their oppressor. In the case of the Kurds, his desire for moving from one oppressive and hierarchical social formation to another permits the elites to reconstruct the existing patriarchal modes of social oppression to secure their position in that presumed future order and thus denies the society the chance of overcoming its patriarchal structure. I will explain that this
subjective limits of the stateless people for perceiving other futures and marks the temporal trap associated with the temporal exile of the stateless subjects.
After this argument, by resuming my critical reflection on Öcalan's historiography I explore the scalar implications of the temporal exile of the stateless subjects. I will explain how the modern principles of national and individual sovereignty realized in the quantification of the nation[-states] and individuals as the fundamental scales of the modern international order, together with the hierarchization of these structurally similar sovereign units based on their power in the capitalist economy and the arena of
international relations have simultaneously provided the condition of possibility of the presence of the state and the temporal exile of the stateless subjects. This permits me to explain why Öcalan's project of rescaling is suggested as the solution to the Kurdish Question. However, the implications of this understanding of the relation of scale and time, I claim, goes beyond the Kurdish Question and permit the construction of a
framework for understanding the scalar-temporal arrangements of the aporetic relation of the state and the condition of statelessness in the modern state-based international system.
Aside from this theoretical contribution, what makes critical and meticulous readings of Öcalan's theory necessary is its proposed solution for the aporetic condition of the Middle East, particularly concerning the problems of democratization and
ethnoreligious conflicts. The importance of such readings has even increased after the rise of the de facto autonomous region of Rojava amidst the war in Syria, which took
Öcalan’s theory as a basis for a communalist structure, and is now trying to solidify the Syrian democratic forces to put up a confederal platform as an alternative to the Syrian state.
A Kurd once told me that speaking of Kurdish nationalism is usually
repellent to other nations of the Middle East; it is as if nationalism has a heroic aspect when attributed to the others but is always blasphemous and virulent when is attributed to the Kurds. It is no exaggeration to say that I have experienced the bitterness of speaking of the Kurdish Question during presentations and talks I have had in the past couple of years through my engagement with the topic, and in communities of Middle Easterns, academics and social activists of different ideologies. The talks have barely been peaceful, even less relevant to the topic of my inquiry, which concerns the theoretical implications and significances of the theory of democratic confederalism. A mere
mentioning of the name of the Kurdish keywords has sufficed to kindle intense arguments about how the Kurdish resurgence threatens other nations' interests. Such interests did not only include that of the domestic people of the four countries in whose territory the Kurds are distributed, namely Turkey, Iraq, Iran, and Syria, but also the interests of other people and resistance movements who benefit from the present order of all or some of these states. The reactions of some of the Kurds were not entirely peaceful either, for a good number of the Kurds of Iran and Iraq to whom I have talked accused Öcalan of sacrificing the Kurdish right to have a nation-state for his idealist and/or socialist ideas. Indeed, I have also talked to various people who were defending the pro-Öcalan Kurdish
resurgence, as well as some who admired the movement but had their critiques of certain theoretical or practical issues. However, such controversies, particularly regarding other nations' interests, were striking and alluding to the delicacy of the task of reflecting on Öcalan's theory, for it seems not to be satisfying the demands of either of the groups described above. Yet, these controversies s point to the importance of the examination of
his theory for it permits the construction of a ground for understanding the logic and mechanism of the political production of the subjective condition that has caused controversies as such. Thus, it is with an awareness of such controversies that this
research aims to take some preliminary steps towards evaluating the contributions and the limits of Öcalan's theory for responding to problems of democracy and ethnic, national and religious conflicts in the Middle East.
This thesis is composed of three main chapters. The first chapter will explore the themes of time and exile in Öcalan's theory in order to explain the condition of
statelessness as a temporal problematic. The second chapter will focus on the theme of scale and will illustrate Öcalan's project of rescaling as a communalist-internationalist project. It will also try to explain the implication of Öcalan's project of rescaling for understanding the scalar-temporal dynamic of the relation of the state and the condition of statelessness. The third chapter will attempt to connect the two themes of scale and exile more clearly and will take Öcalan's rescaling project as an example to explain how the relation of time and scale limits the responses of communalist and anti-statist approaches to the problem of statelessness.
This research relies primarily on Öcalan's post-captivity books, even though I will draw on some parts of his pre-captivity books and interviews wherever comparison is needed. As I will argue, in his post-captivity Books, Öcalan is highly influenced by Murray Bookchin and Immanuel Wallerstein as well as Marx, Rousseau, Kant, and in my view Althusser. That said, Öcalan does not cite any political theorist in his works. The first reason for the absence of proper citation is the condition under which the books are written, or better orally dictated to his lawyer as the defense texts submitted to the
Turkish Court or the European Court of Human Rights. Thus, his lack of access
to proper means of writing, as well as the immediate audience of his books did not permit and demand writing well-cited books. However, I believe another cause that prevents him from mentioning the sources of his thoughts is his reluctance to follow the rules of
production of knowledge in academia and to use the achievements of western philosophy to contribute to what he calls the project of the renaissance of the Middle East. For these reasons, and given that the aim of my research is not to trace the roots of Öcalan's
thoughts, I will keep my referring to these theorists limited to where such citations would help to clarify a point.
Chapter 1: The Kurdish Question: The Time of the
State and a History Betrayed
"But history is not the present - there are clear conditions between them. What is dangerous is to deem them identical without correctly evaluating those conditions. We must then bow before our fate. If this were so, we would have no need to understand any given issue nor any chance for a solution. We need to consider the present as an opportunity for a solution, provided that its terms are found within historical truth." --Abdullah Öcalan9 "If it will kindly be considered that while it is in our interest as tormentors to remain where we are as victims our urge is to move on and that of these two aspirations warring in each heart it would be normal for the latter to triumph if only narrowly for ... when you come to think of it only the victims journeyed"—
Samuel Beckett10
1. Introduction
The "Kurdish Question," a term widely used in reference to the fact that the Kurds do not have a nation-state of their own, commonly is understood to connote the lack and absence of the spatial determination of a polity as Kurdistan. If not entirely reducing, such understandings confine the existential crises of the Kurds, the genocides,
assimilations, oppressions, and exploitations they have suffered, to their absence from the map of the modern world and to the division of Kurdistan into Turkey, Iraq, Syria, and Iran.
Followers of this interpretation seek for the solution to the Kurdish question in some form of territorial sovereignty, either in an integrated nation-state or in minimal,
9 Abdullah Öcalan, Prison Writings III: The Road Map to Negotiations (Cologne: International Initiative, 2012), 26.
territorially sealed, autonomous zones within the territory of another state that
could turn into independent units in the future.11 For the followers of this approach the right of nations to self-determination, as Lenin says, is nothing but "the right to existence as a separate state,"12 all we could do to resolve which implies that a final resolution to the Kurdish Question is in displacing the borders, adding a few more lines, and creating a new sovereign center. What is to be obtained is a form of spatial determination that all the present states enjoy.
Even though Öcalan was primarily holding similar ideas and his observation of how a hierarchical and anti-democratic state contradicted socialist resolution of equality in the Soviet Union,13 and of the impasse of the Palestinian-Israeli struggle in finding a statist solution,14 motivated him to begin questioning the validity of the statist solutions to the Kurdish Question. This ideological transformation became clearer after his captivity in 1999 and his introduction to Murray Bookchin's15 critique of the state. He ultimately
11 These attitudes were characteristics of the resistance of Xoybûn Party, Kurdistan Democratic Party of Iraq (KDP), Patriotic Union Party of Kurdistan (PUK), and pre-21st century struggles of Democratic Party of Iranian Kurdistan (KDP-I) as well Kurdistan Worker's Party (PKK). They became influential in the formation of the Republic of Ararat (1927-1930 by Xoybûn Party) and Republic of Mahabad (1946-1947 by KDP-I), and currently the Kurdistan Region in Iraq. For more information look at: Chris Kutschera, Le Mouvement national Kurde, trans. Ibrahim Yunesi (Tehran: Negah Publication, 1998). (Translated to Farsi from French); David McDowall, A Modern History of the Kurds (London; New York: I.B.Tauris, 2004); Maria Theresa O'Shea, Trapped Between the Map and Reality: Geography and Perceptions of Kurdistan (London : New York: Routledge, 2004).
12 https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1914/self-det/ch01.htm
13 For example: Abdullah Öcalan, Free Kurds, the New Identity of the Middle East (ERXWEBÛN Publication, 2003), 104-114; Öcalan, Prison Writings I, 72, 222-3, 234-9; Öcalan, Democratic Nation, 10-11.
14 Öcalan, Democratic Confederalism, 21-22; Öcalan, Free Kurds, 6-7.
15 He is particularly influenced by Bookchin's understanding of history, oppression, and freedom, in The Ecology of Freedom (1982). Following Bookchin Öcalan accepts that the emergence of hierarchical structures precedes the emergence of the state, and that the abolition of neither the class structure, nor the state can dissolve all forms of oppressive relations of domination. However, compare to Bookchin he gives more weight to the destructive role of the state as the vehicle of the accumulation of the capital and argues that the violence committed by early imperial states [in Sumer] was not comparable to those of the prior communities, neither in scope nor in intensity.
came to reconsider his previous thoughts and tried to invert Lenin's thesis by
arguing that it is wrong to understand self-determination as being only realizable through statist solutions.16 He then became a harsh critic of the [nation-]state and begins
articulating his anti-nation-statist and anti-capitalist secular project of democratic
civilization, or democratic confederalism, based on the core principles of decentralization, gender equality, social ecology, and bottom-up direct democracy. 17
In this chapter, I will argue that what motivates this ideological transformation is Öcalan's turn from having a predominantly spatial understanding of the Kurdish Question to the one that gives more weight to the role of what I call the tyranny of present of the statist orders. The tyranny of present, as I will elaborate on it further, refers to the state's justification of the presence of their present order through creating a more or less
deterministic account of the future, and its use of various mechanisms of colonization and imperialization to integrate as much of the world as it could into its present order.
Through this process, the ruling class deploys the technological developments to maximize its benefit by implementing the most efficient forms of oppression,
marginalization and by the exile of all that might agitate the stability of its presence. In this chapter, I will also argue that for Öcalan, the Kurdish Question, as an ontological issue, and not as the particular problem of the Kurdish nation, refers to the emergence of the situation of exile as a situation of absence in the political order of the world. For Öcalan, the act of exile does not only refer to the expulsion of a community
16 Ahmet Hamdi Akkaya and Joost Jongerden, “Reassembling the Political: The PKK and the Project of Radical Democracy.” European Journal of Turkish Studies. Social Sciences on Contemporary Turkey, no. 14 (June 1, 2012), 11.
from space -i.e. to deprive them from self-determination- but also from history.
This statement has an ontological and an epistemological aspect. Ontologically, it keeps the community less developed in terms of economic, social and technological
developments. Epistemologically, it permits the outsiders to assume that the community is totally stagnant and to ignore their historical agency. The latter has become more
significant in the modern era, when modern philosophies of history have ignored the historical role of geographically marginalized subjects and perceived forces of
development to have always emerged from inside the centers of power. Thus, the Kurds are not only absent from the map of the world but also from, if not historical narratives,
philosophies of history.
Even though my aim in this thesis is not to evaluate the novelty of Öcalan's
theory, it is important to note that, he is not the first theorist to have advanced many of the concepts on which he draws. For example, what I call the tyranny of present of the statist orders echoes Derrida's critique of the metaphysical presence of the sovereign (even though there is no evidence of Derrida's direct influence on Öcalan), Wallerstein's world-system theory as well as Murray Bookchin's critique of modernity. However, Öcalan's innovation is in putting the Kurdish Question at the crossroad of these critiques and thus in claiming that this problem is not resulted by the lack of the Kurdish sovereignty but by the very presence of statist sovereignties.
Following this ideological shift, Öcalan re-reads the history of the Kurds to explore the answers to three questions: Why have the Kurds remained so underdeveloped and seem to be reproducing their feudal-patriarchal relations in the structure of modern
institutions they try to fashion?18 Why have the dominant nation-states been
unable to put forward a democratic platform for a peaceful coexistence with the Kurds?19 And why the Kurds seem to have no way forward but through giving up on their Kurdish identity and integrating into the dominant state or through creating another bourgeois nation-state, which, as undesirable as it is for the majority of the Kurds, seems not to be easily feasible?20
Consequently, I begin this chapter by looking at some episodes in this history of betrayals and by unpacking the paradoxes or problems they highlight. In other words, I will look at some of the historical episodes in the history of the Kurds that describe being in the condition of exile. Then, I will explain what structural and spatiotemporal issues these experiences signify and how the condition of a people without sovereignty has resulted from the statist order of the world in general and the modern-capitalist world order in particular.
18 For example: Abdullah Öcalan, Democratic Confederalism (Cologne: International Initiative Edition, 2011), 272-3.
19 For example: Öcalan, Prison Writings III. The entire book is written following the Turkish state’s request of Öcalan to provide a comprehensive statement of his view for the Kurdish-Turkish dispute. The dialogue was eventually broken off in mid-2011 after the Turkish state did not send any further answer to the prisoner of the İmralı Island. The entire document, thus, interrogates the roots of the lack of a democratic structure for the peaceful coexistence of the Kurds and the Turks and draws the outlines for a solution to this impasse. 20 For example: Abdullah Öcalan, Prison Writings I: The Roots of Civilisation (London ; Ann Arbor, Mich:
Pluto Press, 2007). In this book, by interrogating and giving a particular narrative of the roots of civilization and the dynamic of forces that have been influential in the production of the present from antiquity to the present, Öcalan frames the Kurdish Question as the contemporary manifestation of the historical impasse of, particularly geographically, marginalized subjects and revolutionary politics. Even though he repeats the same narrative in most of his post-captivity works, the first volume of Prison Writings is particularly dedicated to the articulation of his philosophy of history and the elaboration of historical impasse of the Kurdish Question.
2. Five Episodes of a History of Betrayals and Conspiracies
In the introduction to the Fear of Freedom section of his Prison Writings II, Öcalan writes:
“If you choose to get involved in Kurdish politics you need to understand that this is a road paved with treason and conspiracy. You also have to allow for the possibility of total defeat. There are the machinations of the authorities. There are also, and much more dangerously, the almost imperceptible but numerous deadly traps entrenched in the minds and hearts of the people. In the face of these dangers the life-world of the Kurdish
population lies waste like the minefields of the border between two countries. Even the most fertile soil becomes barren when not cultivated for many years. This bareness is the Kurdish reality.”21
Traveling to Kurdish cities, particularly the ones closer to the border, one could witness at least the material representation of what Öcalan calls the bareness reality of the Kurdish world. The region is significantly underdeveloped and “contains all the
characteristics of the [primitive] societies from which the Indo-European civilizations have emerged.”22 Overall, it seems that while the world has reached somewhere, the
21 Abdullah Öcalan, Prison Writings II: The PKK and the Kurdish Question in the 21st Century (Cologne: International Initiative, 2011), 129.
22 Abdullah Öcalan, In Defense of a People (PJAK Press, 2010), 272-3. (In Farsi) It is worth mentioning that various historians, social scientists, and travelers have confirmed that the Kurdish districts of the four countries are significantly less developed than the Turk, Arab, and Fars districts. In Turkey, the mechanization of agriculture, beginning in 1959, forced the majority of rural population of Kurdish districts to migrate to cities and brought those remained in rural areas into absolute poverty. (Zülfüf Aydin, Underdevelopment and Rural Structures in Southeastern Turkey: The Household Economy in Gisgis and Kalhana (London: Published for the Centre for Middle Eastern and Islamic Studies, University of Durham by Ithaca,1986); Kemal H. Karpat, "Social Change and Politics in Turkey. A Structural-Historical Analysis," Social, Economic and Political Studies of the Middle East, v. 7 (Leiden: Brill, 1973).) The cities, however, could not provide this immigrant population with enough jobs due to the lack of even a modest degree of industrial development in Turkey's Kurdistan (White, The PKK: Coming down from the Mountains); thus, many immigrants were forced into low-paid jobs and smuggling across the borders. The situation was not significantly different in Iraq (Kerim Yildiz, The Kurds in Iraq: Past, Present and Future (London ; Ann Arbor: Pluto Press, 2007).), Syria (Michael M. Gunter, Out of Nowhere: The Kurds of Syria in Peace and War (London: C. Hurst & Co. Ltd, 2014).), and with some differences in many parts of Iranian Kurdistan (Kerim Yildiz, The Kurds in Iran: The Past, Present and Future (London ; Ann Arbor, MI: Pluto Press, 2007).).
Kurds have remained where they have always been: in the mountains, both metaphorically23 and literally.
The other side of the reality Öcalan depicts a historical impasse: not only have the Kurds remained where they have been, all their attempts for going somewhere else is being stalled by some form of conspiracy and betrayal. Conspiracy in Öcalan’s account is the totality of structural impediments that impose the rules of the central/hegemon power on others -e.g. the Kurds- and prevents them from going somewhere else or perceiving something else. He argues that conspiracy must be understood to happen in two ways: “ideological deception and brutal oppressive class system, which are often used
simultaneously.”24 Thus, not only does conspiracy oppress a community externally, it also corrupts it internally through constructing subjectivities that would turn the victims into collaborators of the oppressive structure, willingly or unwillingly, consciously or
unconsciously.25 It, therefore, allows the old animosities and relations of domination to be
armored with new weapons and brings a community into the point of self-destruction.
The Original Betrayal
Examples of such betrayals are more frequent in the modern history of the Kurds; however, to justify how such betrayals reveal historical forces that can intervene the present order of the world, Öcalan looks at the past, to the moment of the emergence of paradoxes as such. In this journey to the past, Öcalan looks at the Epic of Gilgamesh,
23 An Iranian proverb describes "less developed", mostly unurbanized, people as the ones “coming from behind the mountains.”
24 Öcalan, Prison Writings II, 100. 25 Ibid, 101.
which he believes, in a metaphorical way, narrates the story of the expulsion of
the Kurds from their Neolithic paradise to a condition of oppression by and subordination to the rules of a state.
In this epic, Gilgamesh,26 the brutal king of Sumer, aspires to expand his imperial hold over the Cedar Forest of the highland of Mesopotamia, the Zagros Mountains,27 where the Kurdish ancestors were living their Neolithic communal lives. Gilgamesh calls cutting the giant cedar tree and harvesting timber from the forest as the main purposes of this expedition.28 In his journey from the walled city of Uruk, the center of a civilization
to the uncivilized forest of the Zagros Mountain where those people outside the history, outside the present of the state dwell, Gilgamesh needs the collaboration of a local ally who knows the way and tricks of defeating Hombaba, the guardian of the forest. 29
26 I will explain later that historical equivalent of the mythical character of Gilgamesh is Sargon, the brutal King of Sumer, who, Öcalan believes, founded the first multi-ethnic empire polity of the history - the Akkadian empire.
27 The historical location of the Cedar Forest in the Epic of Gilgamesh is a matter of controversy. While early translations of the Epic assured that the location of the forest refers to Lebanon Cedars (Cedars of God, one of the early examples of deforestation by humans), more recent researches have suggested that it might have located in the Zagros Mountains. Rowton notes: "The ancient resources clearly suggest that all through the Bronze Age, and even for several centuries after it, the mountainous country continued to be viewed as the domain of the forest. That is the picture, which the Egyptian sources offer for the Lebanon and adjacent parts of Syria and Palestine. The Mesopotamian sources extend this picture far beyond the Egyptian horizon to the Amanus, the Eastern Taurus, and the Zagros." (M. B. Rowton, “The Woodlands of Ancient Western Asia,” Journal of Near Eastern Studies 26, no. 4 (1967): 261–77.). The latter location refers to the geographical location of Kurdistan.
28 Benjamin Foster, et al., eds., The Epic of Gilgamesh: A New Translation, Analogues, Criticism. 1st ed. A Norton Critical Edition (New York: Norton, 2001), Tablet IV.
29 In The Epic of Gilgamesh, the persona of Hombaba is pictured as a barbarian beast: " Humbaba's roar is a flood, his mouth is death and his breath is fire! He can hear a hundred leagues away any [rustling?] in his forest! Who would go down into his forest!" (Foster, The Epic of Gilgamesh, Tablet II.) However, a tablet recently found in Suleymanie, a city in the Kurdish district of Iraq, portrays Humbaba with positive characteristics of a guardian of the forest: "Where Humbaba came and went there was a track, the paths were in good order and the way was well trodden [...] Through all the forest a bird began to sing: A wood pigeon was moaning, a turtle dove calling in answer. Monkey mothers sing aloud, a youngster monkey shrieks: like a band of musicians and drummers daily they bash out a rhythm in the presence of Humbaba." (The full quote retrieved from: Kanishk Tharoor Maruf, “Museum of Lost Objects: The Genie of Nimrud.” BBC News, March 9, 2016, sec. http://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-35755273. Also look at: Gunnar Olsson, Abysmal: A Critique of Cartographic Reason (University of Chicago Press, 2010), 258.)
Through luring a woman who used to be the symbol of the city's temple into prostitution, Gilgamesh deceives a barber named Enkidu, breaks the magic of his wild nature and domesticates him.30 Enkidu, in fact, is the first example of the people of
the high mountains, the "Kurtis," who is deceived by the glamor of the city and in
convinced to collaborate with the imperial power in occupying his homeland.31 In reverse, he has been accustomed to pleasures of living in a city and keeping the king's company.32 Once deceived, Enkidu loses his immanent affiliation with nature and finds a human's body, bereft of its bestial strength; yet, a body whose freedom from nature has not emancipated him as he is a slave to the king of Sumer and to the attractions of the consumerism of the new civilization.
The tale of Gilgamesh and the Cedar Forest in Öcalan's account is not an expression of "man's struggle against the oblivion of death"33 as some have argued; rather, it is the story of the forceful imposition of the time/space of a state on all that is fallen outside it. This is the story of a hegemon state's aspiration for the universalization of its structure and imperialization of others' lands and nature. It is the story of the birth of centralization of the world and the emergence of the very notion of a world order of some kind. Through this process, the Kurds become part of the History [of the center], only to the extent that they have lost their historical agency. This is not an eternal and
30 Foster, The Epic of Gilgamesh, Tablet I; Öcalan, In Defense of a People, 281. 31 Öcalan, In Defense of a People, 281; Öcalan, Prison Writings II, 101. 32 Ibid.
33 Aaron Shaffer, "Gilgamesh, the cedar forest and Mesopotamian history," Journal of the American Oriental Society 103, no. 1 (1983): 307–13, 307.
indestructible loss; yet, it illustrates the foundation of all the following losses they are yet to experience.
Thus, mythologically, the history of the Kurds began as a history of betrayal and conspiracy and the Kurdish Question began by the aspiration of the center of power, the
state, to imperialize its universe.
Öcalan's taking of the Epic of Gilgamesh as the story of the origin of the Kurds could be interpreted in two ways. In one interpretation Öcalan's attempt, his taking of the Kurdish lands as the cradle of the human civilization and his connecting of the present Kurds to the nomads living in the highland of Mesopotamia some forty-five century ago, is quite nationalistic. Even though Öcalan does not understand the Kurds as an ethnically homogenous nation, this interpretation seems to contain some truth for part of his project is to create a Kurdish national consciousness.
Another interpretation is to understand Öcalan's referring to the Epic of
Gilgamesh as an attempt to unfold the process through which the imperialism of one state creates a world order, or as I will explain later, a world system, with unequal modes of existence. In this interpretation, the importance of the Epic is in its abstraction of the moment of the emergence of an imperial order and the importance of the Kurds is that they exemplify the relation between the center of an imperial order and other
communities. The imperialization and colonization of the Kurds in this Epic marks a series of detachments - i.e. the detachment of culture from nature, of the man from the woman, of the master from the slave, of the present from the absent - which still prevail in human societies. It marks the beginning of a fall.
I do not deny the nationalist element of Öcalan's thought; indeed, I will argue later that he does not even claim to be an nation thinker, rather an anti-nationalism and anti-nation-state one. However, this is the second interpretation that I believe is more important for understanding his diagnosis of the conceptual emergence of the Kurdish Question.
Tribes and Struggle for Power
After this story of expulsion,34 Öcalan argues, the history of the Kurds turns into a
history of betrayals and conspiracies that particularly become more frequent after the
Battle of Chaldiran. The battle determined the Ottoman-Safavid borders with the Ottomans gaining the northwest of Iran and the majority of Kurdish districts that are currently located in the territories of Turkey, Iraq, and Syria.
Throughout this battle, which marked the beginning of the fragmentation of the Kurdish homeland, the Safavids and the Ottomans attempted to keep the Kurdish tribes at their side, which stimulated rivalries among tribes.35 Some tribal chiefs switched their allegiance from the Safavids to the Ottomans;36 however, many of them were later
34 In Öcalan's account, this story is another version of the myth of creation. He argues: "The complex idea of paradise undoubtedly deserves a more thorough analysis than I can offer here. The essential dialectics underlying its construction seem to that for those who are subjugated, it meant the yearning for a place and time when coercion, organised violence and hierarchies did not exist, when all people were considered of equal worth, and all lived in unity with nature. This early utopian vision was nourished by the mental projection of a lost Neolithic order. For the newly burgeoning ruling class, paradise meant a world where they were freed from the obligation to work and where the services of a large number of creatures were freely available to them. Paradise, then, seems to be the concept that emerged as a product of the imaginative intermingling of what those who were pushed down dreams of, and what those who rose above them luxuriously enjoyed, at the time of the unfolding of the class society.” Öcalan, Prison Writings, 58. 35 Sharaf al-Din Bidlisi, Sharafnameh: A Detailed History of Kurdistan (Tehran: Elmi Publication, 1964). 36 Martin Sicker, The Islamic World in Ascendancy: From the Arab conquests to the Siege of Vienna (Praeger
betrayed and slaughtered by Sultan Salim of the Ottomans.37 Öcalan claims that
those who were killed were religious minorities, mostly Alawite, who did not convert into the Sunni faith of the Ottomans.38 From this time on, he argues, Sunni Islam became the
symbol of betrayal and vehicle of the justification of exploitative and oppressive feudal mentality among the Kurds.39
However, until the late 19th century the rivalry was mostly between the Ottoman and the Safavid empires.40 It was mostly in the late 19th century, at the brink of the constitutional turn in Qajar's Iran and the Ottoman Empire that rivalries escalated because of tribal chiefs' attempts to find their position in the newly emerging national order.41 To further align themselves with the ideologies of the state or the constitutionalists some tribes changed their religions; particularly in Iran, many converted to Shia Islam.42
In Iran, rivalries over gaining the governorship of Kurdish cities, principally the border towns, kindled severe struggles among the tribes.43Across the border in the
37 Joseph Freiherr von Hammer-Purgstall, The History of Ottoman Empire (Tehran: Zarrin Publication, 1988), 861. (In Farsi)
38 Öcalan, In Defense of a People, 277.278.
39 Ibid. Öcalan believes that among the Kurds, Zoroastrianism, Shi'ism and Alawism were religions of resistance; and that Sunni'ism was the religion of betrayal. I suspect that his observation is based on the case of Turkey and cannot explain the religious diversity in Iran or even Syria. However, the accuracy of this observation, I believe, is irrelevant. What matters is, insofar as in the Middle East religions have determined the ideologies of states, the distinction between the religions of the majority and minorities has marked the distinction between ideologies of power and resistance.
40 David McDowall, A Modern History of the Kurds, Third Edition (London; New York: I.B.Tauris, 2004), 1. 41 Ibid, 74.
42 Ibid, 77-78.
43 One of the examples of such rivalries took place in the early 19th century over the governorship of Kermanshah, the province in which one of the most important border towns between Mesopotamia and Iran, Qasr-i-Shirin, is located. For the lack of authority and corruption of the Kalhors who were the governor tribe of the city, tribes committed banditry and caused extreme insecurity along the caravan line that would connect Qasr-i-Shirin to the pilgrimage cities of Karbala and Najaf. The state's attempt for changing the governor of this city and the capital city of Kermanshah at this time coincided with the struggle between constitutionalists and monarchs in Iran. This struggle permitted the tribes to take their rivalry to another
Ottoman Empire, Sultan Abdul Hamid II attempted to mobilize Sunni Kurds as auxiliaries in the form of Hamidiye Cavalry to combat challenges against Ottoman's eastern borders, mostly carried out by Russia.44 In reality, what happened though was a
further use of this new source of power by the tribal chiefs to their own benefit. Since military solidarities followed tribal attachments, within tribes struggle for rank became common among grandees.45 Moreover, the tribes who were armed as Hamidiye cavalries used this new source of power to oppress minorities such as non-Sunni tribes, Alawites and Armenians, as well as their own poorer clusters.46
For Öcalan these conflicts are to be understood as the manipulation of the Kurds by the dominant states and later the Britain that saw the escalation of ethnic conflicts as the vehicle of its divide and rule policy in the Middle East. Beginning in the 19th century,
“the status quo of Turkish-Kurdish relations [was] disturbed. The leading
capitalist colonial powers, mainly Britain, had taken a dangerous direction in their Middle East policy. On the one hand, they wanted to protect the Christian minorities; on the other, they wanted to shield the sultanate from the ambitions of the Russian Tsar. The Kurds became isolated in the process when required, they were utilised like playing cards in the power play.”47
Kurds were the playing cards in the British game of “divide et imperia” and their division within the four countries permitted the imperial power to use them for oppressing others while preventing the danger of future unification of possible regional resistances.
level by aligning themselves with whatever party that would promise them more advantage and power. Such
proceedings exacerbated tribal disputes and led to severe armed struggles. (McDowall, A Modern History of the Kurds, 77-81.)
44 Joost Jongerden, et al., Social Relations in Ottoman Diyarbekir, 1870-1915 (BRILL, 2012), 172. 45 McDowall, A Modern History of the Kurds, 59-61.
46 Lynch, Harry Finnis Blosse. Armenia, Travels and Studies, (London; New York; Bombay: Longmans, Green, and Co., 1901), p.219. McDowall, A Modern History of the Kurds, 60.
The significance of such stories is that they represent the Kurdish
historical trap, the heritage of Enkidu's betrayal. When Fars and Turkish people were all experiencing some kind of modernization and were developing constitutional reforms, the Kurds were stuck in their patriarchal-feudal relations and subjectivities. To become more powerful they had to align themselves with one of the centers of power; yet, they would only use this power to reproduce their old societal norms and prejudices. This
underdevelopment, which was a result of their expulsion to the borderlands and to the
mountains, had made their manipulation with other states and communities even easier.
Bordering the Modern Middle East
The Treaty of Sèvres, negotiated and signed in 1920, broke the promises of independence that Britain and France had given to the Kurds and cut their land into four pieces.48 Prior to this time, Britain presented itself as a defender of the freedom of the Kurdish people who, like the rest of peoples of the region, were entitled to enjoy national rights.49
Indeed, the root cause of this abjuration was the British-French rivalry in sacking the Middle East. In the period between Sykes-Picot and the Treaty of Sèvres, the Britain examined the province of Mosul's oil resources.50 Having been ensured of the presence of ample resources, Britain committed to breaking her former promise of leaving Mosul to France, in return France demanded some parts of the western territories of Kurdistan. In
48 Heather Lehr. Wagner, The Division of the Middle East: The Treaty of Sèvres (Chelsea House Pub, 2004), 44 & 55.
49 M. Kendel, "Kurdistan in Turkey," in Ghassemlou, Abdul Rahman, and Gérard Chaliand, eds., People without a Country: The Kurds and Kurdistan (London, UK: Zed Press, 1980), 59.
fact, even though the Treaty of Sèvres still promised the Kurds an autonomous
homeland, it promised an area bereft of the bulk of the traditional Kurdish territory that contained all the natural resources and fertile grounds, including the oil rich province of Mosul.51By breaking this promise even further in the Treaty of Lausanne (1923), France gained the control of the west and also (through Syria) the south of Kurdistan, Persia was given the eastern region, Armenia was given the north, Britain gained Mosul and the rest remained for the Turks.52
During the period between Sykes-Picot and Sèvres, various Kurdish delegates and tribal chiefsapproached either the British or the French and proposed siding with them against the other party and giving them the control of the Kurdish market, in exchange for an autonomous Kurdistan.53 The primary concern of these delegates, as Chris Kutschera and Öcalan both noted, was not the independence of Kurdistan; rather, they were selling the Kurdish land in exchange for their personal power.54 It was the continuation of the
rivalries of tribal chiefs, which prevented the formation of national consciousness and solidarity needed for independence.
51 In fact, it was the Treaty of Lausanne (1923) that completely ignored the territorial claim of the Kurds. The article 62 of Treaty of Sèvres described the provisional territory of the Kurdish autonomous zone as such: "A Commission sitting at Constantinople and composed of three members appointed by the British, French and Italian Governments respectively shall draft within six months from the coming into force of the present Treaty a scheme of local autonomy for the predominantly Kurdish areas lying east of the Euphrates, south of the southern boundary of Armenia as it may be hereafter determined, and north of the frontier of Turkey with Syria and Mesopotamia." However, the article 64 conditioned the granting of this independence on the desire of the majority of these areas' population to become independent from Turkey and the approval of the Council "that these peoples are capable of such independence". (Retrieved from: The World War I Document Archive, Peace Treaty of Sèvres, Section I, Article 1-260. Accessed May 1, 2017. https://wwi.lib.byu.edu/index.php/Section_I,_Articles_1_-_260.)
52 Wagner, The Division of the Middle East, 60-61. 53 Kutschera, Le Mouvement national Kurde, 45. 54 Ibid, 46; Öcalan, Leadership and People, 62-3.
Once again, the aporetic condition reveals itself and the Kurds seem not
to be able to move forward, that is to achieve independence or to suggest an alternative for the present forms of self-determination. Spatial order of the world around them is transforming and with it, new perceptions of the future are emerging. Once again, attaining the present achievements of the dominant powers becomes all the Kurds can desire for their future. Yet, while the Kurds' desire for obtaining this present is ignored, they seem unable to develop the mentality needed for the attainment of their national independence. This mentality was not limited to national consciousness; it also comprised knowledge of foreign policy and negotiation, which they had not practiced due to their marginal condition in the Ottoman and Safavid empires.
The Turkish Republic and the Denial of the Kurdish Question
If the mandate powers ignored the Kurds right to self-determination, the dominant states, most notably Turkey, ignored their civil rights. Perhaps the worst experiences of betrayal in the history of the Kurds took place after the Turkish republic turned its back on the Kurds who were an instrumental pillar of the Turkish War of Independence (1919-1923) that led to the demise of the Ottoman Empire and the rise of the Republic of Turkey.
Towards the end of the Ottoman era, rumors suggested that six of the provinces in which Kurds were spreading were to be ceded to Armenia including the province of Vane.55 Kurdish notables were afraid that by gaining sovereignty Armenians will take revenge of the sack of their settlements by the Kurds in the past. Turkish nationalists soon
55 Kendel, "Kurdistan in Turkey," 55.
realized how to use this fear of Kurdish notables to their benefit. They sent
General Mustafa Kemal, soon to become the Ataturk of modern Turkey, to mobilize the Kurds in the Turkish War of Independence. Once Mustafa Kemal arrived in the Kurdish territory, he "immediately presented himself as the 'saviour of Kurdistan', the champion of a Caliph 'imprisoned by the occupation forces' and the defender of ' Muslim lands soiled by the impious Christians."56 He called for the unity of the Kurds and the Turks to rescue their "Muslim Fatherland.”57 The Turks victories in Georgia and their Genocide of Armenians were mostly achieved with the collaboration of the Kurds.58 However, soon
after the Armenian genocide the Kurds' became the target of the state's oppression and massacres. Mustafa Kemal's plan for the establishment of a Turkish nation-state had no room even for the ally Kurds.
The conflict between the Turks and the Kurds began by the Republic of Turkey's suppression of the Koçkiri Rebellion in 1920 and was followed by the suppression of the Sheikh Said Rebellion (1925), the Ararat Rebellion (1927–30), and the Dersim Rebellion (1937-18).59 Turkey's brutality in crushing these uprisings was so profound that even the
56 Ibid.
57 Ibid. 58 Ibid, 56.
59 In Prison Writing III, Öcalan argues that perhaps it was not Mustafa Kemal's intention from the beginning to exclude the Kurds from the structure of the state. What probably has made him change his mind was the new wave of Kurdish national movements and rebellions that began around 1921. These movements in Öcalan's view where not progressive and were the continuations of the same tribal and patriarchal mentalities he criticizes in all his works. However, since that book is written in response to the Turkish state request of Öcalan to write a comprehensive statement of his suggestion for the Turkish-Kurdish conflict, Öcalan might have deliberately respected Mustafa Kemal as a sign of his good will for achieving a peaceful solution. After all, Mustafa Kemal had no reason to hesitate ignoring the very existence of the Kurdish Question. After the war, the Kurds themselves realized that they have no power; they were fighting for the Army that belonged to the Turks. They were unorganized and suffered multiple disputes among themselves. Kendel, "Kurdistan in Turkey," 57.
British consul at Trebizond compares it with the Armenian genocide and states that thousands of Kurds
"including women and children, were slain;others, mostly children, were thrown into the Euphrates; while thousands of others in less hostile areas, who had first been deprived of their cattle and other belongings, were deported to vilayets (provinces) in Central Anatolia. It is now stated that the Kurdish question no longer exists in Turkey."60
The brutal suppression of Dersim paralyzed nationalist movements in Turkey for about half a century until the rise of PKK in the 1970s.
In the following years of the Turkish War of Independence, the Republic banned the public use and teaching of the Kurdish language and imposed martial laws on Kurdish districts.61 As of 1934, "a new Turkish law divided Turkey into three zones, and the state was vested with the power to compulsorily transfer those from the third ‘zone’ deemed to ‘require assimilation’."62 This process of "Turkification" along with forceful policies of displacement, which was a contributory factor to the Dersim uprising, attempted to disperse Kurdish population and to turn them into small minorities in their settlements.63
Öcalan denotes that it is wrong to consider the Turkey's issue only a matter of ethnic conflict for from the beginning the Turkish state was a bourgeois state with
60 Robert W. Olson, The Emergence of Kurdish Nationalism and the Sheikh Said Rebellion, 1880-1925. 1st ed. (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1989), 107.
61 Kerim Yildiz, The Kurds in Turkey: The Past, Present and Future (London ; Ann Arbor, MI: Pluto Press, 2005), 16.
62 Ibid.
63 Ibid. In addition to the direct oppression of the Kurds by the state, the Turkish nationalists have the right to slender the Kurdish people even to call publicly for their physical extermination but the Kurds have no right to reply. For example the June 1967 issue of the Nationalist journal Otuken published: "If they [the Kurds] want to carry on speaking a primitive language with vocabularies of only four or five thousand words, let them go and do it somewhere else. We Turks have shed rivers of blood to take possession of these lands; we had to uproot Georgians, Armenians and Byzantine Greeks. [...] Let them go off wherever they want, to Iran, to Pakistan, to India, or to join Barzani. Let them ask the United Nations to find them a homeland in Africa. The Turkish race is very patient, but when it is really angered it is like a roaring lion and nothing can stop it. Let them ask the Armenians who we are, and let them draw the appropriate conclusions." (M. Kendel, "Kurdistan in Turkey," in Ghassemlou, Abdul Rahman, and Gérard Chaliand, eds., People without a Country: The Kurds and Kurdistan (London, UK: Zed Press, 1980), 86-87.)
systematic class oppression. Not only in the Treaty of Lausanne was Turkey
committed to facilitate its integration in the global market, but also Kemalism, from its very beginning, had relied on the power of notables, even among the Kurds. The rights of minorities and lower classes were not of the new state's interest, only the national
homogeneity needed for the development of the economy. The regime further adopted Mussolini's form of labor legislation based on banning strikes and trade unions and authorizing employees to make the workers work up to 13 hours a day.64 The Republic of Turkey, Öcalan claims, was an early example of the fascism that one could observe in Germany and Italy.
This betrayal took the trap of the Kurds one step further. The only future perceivable to the Kurds looked to be the present of the nation-states, which ironically appeared to be impossible to attain. However, Öcalan contends that none of the nationalist movements of this period was progressive; they aborted the seeds of democracy and were essentially driven by patriarchal and tribal mentalities.65 To ask why the Kurds were not given independence is not the right question to ask from this situation. Rather, Öcalan implies, one must ask why the structure of the Turkish state was unable to come up with a democratic solution for the Kurdish dilemma; why the homogeneity of the nation looked to be attainable merely through repressing the Kurds and denying their only perceivable future; and why most of the nationalist movements could not detach themselves from tribal and patriarchal affiliations.
64 Kendel, "Kurdistan in Turkey," 71.
Struggle for Power in Kurdish Nationalist Movement
The struggle for this only perceivable future did not only take place between the state and the Kurds. It also transmuted the Kurdish tribal rivalries into the struggle for hegemony over Kurdish nationalism. Clear examples of such conflicts are the battle between Komala Party of Iranian Kurdistan and Kurdistan Democratic Party (KDP), both of which were identified as leftist-Marxist parties, from 1984 to 1988. Komala's central committee sent out a declaration and called it a war over the "Hegemony of Kurdistan", "Hegemony over revolutionary movements of the Kurdish People" and "Leadership of the Kurdish Movement".66
In less than a decade, KDP entered into another civil war, this time in Iraq, with Patriotic Union of Kurdistan (PUK), which lasted from 1994 to 1997 and involved most of factions of Iraqi Kurds. This war, which was primarily over the government of the city of Kirkuk, left around 5,000 casualties.67
Another example is the collaboration of Iraqi PUK with Ankara in crushing PKK that led to the killing of civilians on the borderlands of the two countries. The no-fly-zone proclaimed by the US, the UK, and France after the Gulf War in northern Iraq to protect the Kurds from the Iraqi aircraft permitted the escalation of Kurdish rebellions. Ankara was concerned that either PKK, who had some of its camps in northern Iraq, might use this opportunity to intensify its raids into Turkish territory, or that the Iraqi Kurds might use the vacuum power to establish a nation-state that would further encourage Turkey's
66 Komala Central Committee, "A Summary of the evaluation of the five months of our War with the Kurdistan Democratic Party". Accessed May 1, 2017. http://m-hekmat.com/fa/3540fa_z1.html. (In Farsi) 67 Charles McDermid, "New Force Emerges in Kirkuk," Asl Times. Accessed May 1, 2017.
Kurds in their movement.68 Aware of the rivalries among Kurdish factions,
Ankara tried to hit two birds with one stone by establishing formal and regular relations with the leaders of both PUK and KDP and using their assistance in eliminating the PKK, killing the rebels and destroying their bases in the north of Iraq.69 With the assistance of Iraqi Kurds, Turkey later bombed several cities and villages in the northern Iraq;
however, they were not only PKK fighters who were killed but also the civilians.
In spite of limited collaborations in certain periods, Öcalan criticizes Iraqi Kurdish nationalist parties for their patriarchal structure. The parties lack any of PKK's feminist agendas and have tried to expand the hegemony of two families (Talibani and Barzani) over Iraqi Kurdistan. Öcalan claims that in this rivalry, the Iraqi parties are being manipulated by the US; for the United States’ main objective of supporting the establishment of an Iraqi Kurdistan was to create a regional ally for Israel.70
Struggles within and between Kurdish nationalist organizations and parties are not limited to these cases. There are also multiple examples of rivalries for power within PKK as well as examples of the PKK's assassination of members of other parties to some of which Öcalan refers. What they all have in common, however, is that they illustrate the subjective impasse of the Kurds; implies that they were trapped between an obligation for the reproduction of tribal-feudal social relations in the body of modern organizations and a desire for having a nation whose homogeneity looked to be only attainable through
68 Asa Lundgren, "Defending Through Violation: Ankara's Contradictory Strategies Over the Turkish-Iraqi Border," in Brandell, Inga, ed. State Frontiers: Borders and Boundaries in the Middle East (London; New York: I.B. Tauris, 2006), 108.
69 Ibid.
